This year's fastest-growing companies showcase digital's dominance

If you were in Times Square last Wednesday afternoon, you might have seen the jumbotron flash a shout-out to this year's Fast 50 list. Our photographer, Buck Ennis, captured the moment for this week's cover.

Companies pay an arm and a leg to get in front of the nearly half a million people who pass through Times Square daily. But we just called up New Tradition, a scrappy media firm that is 46th on our annual list of the fastest- growing companies in the metropolitan area. New Tradition owns rights to sell ads in Times Square, one reason why its revenue has gone up 375% in the past three years.

There's no shortage of advertising firms on our list this year, but most are ad tech companies that have found furious growth helping Madison Avenue connect with consumers online. No surprise there. Ad tech has dominated the rankings for the past few years.

Although New Tradition's name harkens back to a predigital past, its brick-and-billboard business necessarily competes with the internet. And what better way to do that than with the biggest screen of all?

Pretty much every Fast 50 company is trying in one way or another to harness digital's powerful current. There was a strong showing this year by e-commerce companies including No. 2 Boxed, No. 3 Try the World and No. 6 MM.LaFleur, to name three of the dozen companies on the list that primarily sell goods online.

Their success comes as the traditional retail industry has imploded. In 2012 department stores slashed 200,000 jobs nationally, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Since 2013 they have cut 80,000 more jobs. E-commerce companies, meanwhile, have added roughly 100,000.

Our Fast 50 e-commerce companies are competing, and sometimes partnering, with the dominant players, Amazon and Walmart, and doing so in New York, a high-cost locale. (It helps that some have operations in New Jersey and on Long Island—one reason we consider the entire metro area.)

These companies are winning because they can produce more with fewer workers than most brick-and-mortar operations. The 16,428 employees at our Fast 50 companies (a third of whom are in the city) generated about $4.5 billion in revenue last year. That's nearly $274,000 per employee—far less than at Apple ($1.9 million) but substantially more than at Chipotle ($60,000). If New York can produce more such jobs than it loses to retail, the economy as a whole and those at the bottom rungs could end up better off.

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